CLARENCE PAGE Chicago Tribune

Just before I received news of the fatal abortion clinic bombing in Birmingham, Ala., I received an invitation to a showing of director Spike Lee's new documentary Four Little Girls.

How ironic, I thought. How painfully appropriate.

The documentary recounts the bomb that killed four young black girls while they were putting on their choir robes on a Sunday morning in 1963 in Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church was targeted because many civil rights meetings and voting instruction sessions were held there. But, at the time of the bombing, there was nothing going on but Sunday school.

The shameful tragedy earned the city a new name in civil rights circles: ``Bombingham.''

Many Alabamians of good conscience, white and black, said ``enough'' after that atrocity. Today black mayors, black police chiefs and black business progress signal the great changes that have occurred in Birmingham and the rest of the South.

But some things have not changed. Some people still think they can use terror bombs to get their way in Birmingham.

That's why I found a particularly pointed message in the small homemade bomb that killed an off-duty police officer and critically injured a nurse outside the clinic in Birmingham Thursday.

I am sure it was not the message the bomber _ or bombers _ intended.

Organized abortion opponents like to compare their movement nobly to earlier heroic efforts by the abolitionists or civil rights activists.

But the fatal clinic bombing sends a message closer to the truth. The anti-abortion movement, particularly in its most radical wings, stands closer to those who opposed equal rights for blacks than it does to those who favored them.

It is not my intention to paint with too broad a brush. I respect those people of good faith who oppose abortion on consistently pro-life grounds, whether in the womb or on Death Row. I also respect those who take their anti-abortion fight to the courts or the ballot box.

Rather, it is those who, frustrated at the ballot box, have taken to the bomb or the bullet who bring shame to the cause they espouse. So do those who do not bomb or block on their own but, through their half-hearted condemnations, offer aid and comfort to those who do.

Just as Congress responded to the 1963 bombing, by passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a more recent Congress responded to rising anti-abortion militancy with the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. But, while access to clinics has been aided, violence against them has increased.

Since the anti-abortion movement turned violent, five people, including two doctors, have been shot to death in front of clinics, according to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. There also have been 47 bombings and 151 arsons at clinics since 1982, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They include 13 in 1997, twice the number of the previous year.

They include two bombs that exploded within an hour of each other in January of last year, destroying a clinic in suburban Atlanta and injuring seven people. Authorities received a hand-written letter signed by ``The Army of God'' claiming the blame for that double bombing.

``Anyone in and around facilities that murder children may become victims of retribution,'' it warned. ``The next facility targeted may not be empty.''

That's their message: They're pro-life, as long as they get what they want.

That's not pro-life. That's just anti-choice.

That was not the message of the abolitionist or the civil rights movement. Both movements favored constitutional rights and crusaded to make sure those rights applied to everyone. The anti-choice movement wants to extend constitutional rights to the unborn, who have never had them under our Constitution. The nation's founders were reluctant to give rights to the unborn, at least until ``quickening,'' the first detection of movement in the womb.

That debate goes on. But the anti-choice movement has no time for debates. They would rather take the issue into their own hands.

With that, they forfeit moral authority, the most powerful weapon civil rights advocates and other movements had on their side. The militant anti-choice movement apparently doesn't think it needs moral authority. Not when it has bombs.